Over the Pass eBook

“He seems to be a character!” whispered
Prather to Bob, as he smiled at the prospect.
“To confess the truth, I am a little saddle sore
and tired. I didn’t get much riding in
Goldfield. I think I’ll stop and rest and
get acquainted.”

“You won’t get much satisfaction but growls.”

“That will be all the more fun for me,”
rejoined Prather. “But don’t let
me keep you.”

“No. I must be going on. I’ve
got some things to look after before nightfall,”
said Bob, while Prather, in a humor proof against any
hermit cantankerousness, rode into the yard.

When he returned after dark he said, laughingly, that
he had enjoyed himself, though the conversation was
all on one side. The next morning he decided
to take up the plot of land adjoining Jack’s.

“But I shall not be able to begin work for a
few weeks,” he said. “I must go to
Goldfield to settle up my affairs before I begin my
new career.”

“If Jack ever comes back I wonder what he will
say to his new neighbor!” Little Rivers wondered.

XIX

LOOKING OVER PRECIPICES

To Mary Ewold the pass was a dividing line between
two appeals. The Little Rivers side, with the
green patch of oasis in the distance, had a message
of peaceful enjoyment of what fortune had provided
for her. Under its spell she saw herself content
to live within garden walls forever in the land that
had given her life, grateful for the trickles of intelligence
that came by mail from the outside world.

The other side aroused a mighty restlessness.
Therefore, she rarely made that short journey which
spread another panorama of space before her. But
this was one of the afternoons when she welcomed a
tumult of any kind as a relief from her depression;
and she went on through the V as soon as she reached
the summit.

Seated on a flat-topped rock, oblivious of the passage
of time, of the dream cities of the Eternal Painter,
she was staring far away where the narrowing gray
line between the mountain rims met the sky. She
was seeing beyond the horizon. She was seeing
cities of memory and reality. A great yearning
was in her heart. All the monotonous level lap
of the heights which seemed without end was a symbol
that separated her from her desire.

She imagined herself in a Pullman, flashing by farms
and villages; in a shop selecting gowns; viewing from
a high window the human stream of Fifth Avenue; taking
passage on a steamer; hearing again foreign tongues
long ago familiar to her ears; sensing the rustle of
great audiences before a curtain rose; glimpsing the
Mediterranean from a car window; feeling herself a
unit in the throbbing promenade of the life of many
streets while her hunger took its fill of a busy world.

“It is hard to do it all in imagination!”
she said to herself. “Even imagination
needs an occasional nest-egg of reality by way of
encouragement.”